Thank you!

Thanks to your advocacy efforts on our behalf, we're happy to report that the recently passed Omnibus Spending Bill includes a very small increase in funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities! While our work is not over with regards to the upcoming 2018 budget to be passed in the fall, the Omnibus Spending Bill represents an endorsement of the important work that the humanities do for our communities. These funds will continue to support our work of providing free access to authoritative content about Virginia's history and culture.

William Strachey (1572–1621)

William Strachey was a member
of the Virginia Council, served as secretary and recorder for the colony from 1610
until 1611, and was one of the first historians of the Jamestown settlement. Educated at Cambridge
and Gray's Inn, he wrote verse and befriended poets Ben Jonson and John Donne before
serving a brief stint as secretary to the English ambassador at Constantinople
(1606–1607). Strachey then returned to England, purchased two shares in the Virginia Company of London, and
in 1609 sailed on the Sea Venture, the flagship of a resupply fleet bound for the colony. When a storm ran the
ship aground on the Bermudas, he and
his shipmates were stranded for nearly a year, but eventually managed to construct
two small vessels, Patience and Deliverance, and arrived at Jamestown in May 1610. Strachey's account of the
adventure, published in 1625 as A true
reportory of the wracke, and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight, probably had served, years earlier, as source material for William
Shakespeare's play The Tempest. In Virginia, Strachey was appointed to the Council
and made its secretary and recorder, in which capacity the company requested that he
produce an extensive account of the colony and its future prospects. When he
completed The Historie
of Travaile into Virginia Britannia in 1612, the company declined to publish it. In the years since, however, it
has become one of the most important sources of information on early Virginia Indian society, politics, and religion.
Strachey died in poverty in London in 1621. MORE...

In This Entry

Map This Entry

Share It

Early Years

Strachey was born on April 4, 1572, in Saffron Walden, Essex, in the southeast of
England, on an estate that his grandfather, also named William Strachey, had
purchased a decade earlier. He was the oldest son of four sons and three daughters
born to William Strachey and Mary Cooke Strachey. The Strachey family had long
been prosperous farmers in Saffron Walden, while the Cookes were wealthy London
merchants with property in Kent. On July 4, 1587, William Strachey (the elder) was
awarded a coat of arms, making him—and by extension his sons—a gentleman. Mary
Cooke Strachey died in 1587, and in August of that year Strachey (the elder)
married Elizabeth Brocket of Hertfordshire. They had five daughters.

William Strachey (the younger) enrolled at Emmanuel College, University of
Cambridge, on February 14, 1588, and on June 9, 1595, he married Frances Forster,
a distant relative of his mother and the daughter of a wealthy landowner in
Surrey. They had two sons: William, who was baptized on March 30, 1596, and
Edmund, baptized on February 26, 1604, both at Crowhurst, Surrey. William Strachey
(the father) died in November 1598, leaving his estate to his wife Elizabeth
Brocket Strachey and then, upon her death in 1602, to his son William Strachey.
The inheritance appears to have supported Strachey and his family for the next few
years, and by 1605 he was a member of Gray's Inn, the largest of the Inns of
Court. No evidence exists that he ever practiced law; instead, he pursued
interests in literature and the theater.

Strachey contributed a
prefatory sonnet to a 1604 publication of Ben Jonson's Sejanus His Fall, a play first performed at the Globe in 1603 by William
Shakespeare and his company. The journalist John St. Loe Strachey later called the
poem "one of the most cryptic things in the whole of Elizabethan literature." A
shareholder in the Blackfriars Theatre in London, William Strachey apparently was
friends with Jonson, the poet John Donne, and perhaps even Shakespeare.

With his inheritance running low, in 1606 Strachey drew upon his wife's
connections to gain a post as secretary to Sir Thomas Glover, who represented both
the Levant Company and King James
I at the Ottoman Empire's capital at Constantinople. Traveling aboard the
Royal Exchange, the party stopped in Algiers and Greece
before arriving in Constantinople on December 23, 1606. Soon after, however,
Strachey fell out with Glover, who described him as "that most malicious knave"
and who fired him on March 17, 1607. The Levant Company wrote Strachey that he had
"much overshott" himself by communicating too freely with the former ambassador,
Henry Lello. With a letter of introduction from John Donne, Strachey sailed to
Venice but was unable to secure a job, and finally returned to England.

Bermuda

On May 23, 1609, James I granted the
Virginia Company of London a second charter, the publication of which included the name of
shareholder "William Strachey, gentleman." Strachey's friend Donne, meanwhile,
sought the position of secretary but the company instead appointed Matthew Scrivener, who was
already in Virginia. When the fleet of ships left Plymouth for Virginia on June 2,
Strachey was aboard the flagship Sea Venture (or Sea Adventure); neither his wife and young sons nor his
friend Donne joined him.

On July 24, the ships were separated by a storm, and the Sea
Venture, which carried much of the colony's new leadership, including
Lieutenant Governor Sir Thomas
Gates and Admiral Sir
George Somers, was thought lost. In fact, it was blown off course and ran
aground on a fishhook-shaped group of islands known as the Bermudas.
Strachey vividly described the storm in A true reportory of the
wracke, and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight, writing that "we could
not apprehend in our imaginations any possibility of greater violence." He
suggested their survival was miraculous: "The Lord knoweth, I had as little hope,
as desire of life in the storme, & in this, it went beyond my will."

The Shipwreck That
Saved Jamestown: The Sea
Venture Castaways and the Fate
of America

The castaways spent about
ten months on the uninhabited islands, and Strachey appears to have insinuated
himself into the company of the Sea Venture's captain, Christopher Newport. On
February 11, 1610, he and Newport served as witnesses to the christening
of John Rolfe's daughter, named
Bermuda, and on March 25, he, Newport, and James Swift became godfathers to a baby
boy called Bermudas. (Rolfe's wife and daughter both died.) Strachey served on
Gates's crew, building one of two pinnaces out of the Sea
Venture's wreckage, and his account notes "dangers and divellish
disquiets" that overcame some of the men. Somers and Gates clashed, a sailor was
murdered, and multiple mutinies were quashed, with one colonist executed.

Once the pinnaces Deliverance and Patiencewere
built, the colonists set sail for Virginia, arriving at Point Comfort in
the Chesapeake Bay on May
21, 1610. On May 24, they arrived in Jamestown and there, according to Strachey,
found "all things so contrary to our expectations, so full of misery and
misgovernment."

Virginia

In Virginia, Strachey and his fellow
castaways were greeted with surprise and relief by a colony on the verge of
collapse. Over the winter, the settlers, under the command of Captain George Percy, had
suffered through the Starving
Time. The Indians' siege of the Jamestown fort, exacerbated by drought
and cold weather, had made hunting, fishing, and foraging nearly impossible; of
about 240 English colonists at the fort in November 1609, only about 60 skeletal
survivors remained the following May. Having brought no extra food from Bermuda,
Gates decided to abandon Virginia, but as the
colonists sailed down the James
River, they encountered a resupply mission accompanied by the new governor, Thomas West, baron De La
Warr.

De La Warr soon convened the Council, which included Strachey, who also was chosen
to be its secretary and recorder. (Matthew Scrivener had drowned in January 1609.)
One of De La Warr's first actions was to expand a set of rules, instituted by
Gates, that governed the colony. The persistent and widespread perception was
that, in Strachey's words, "sloath, riot and vanity" had been to blame for the
famine. Strachey complained that "the headlesse multitude, (some neither of
qualitie nor Religion) [were] not imployed to the end for which they were sent
hither, no not compelled (since in themselves unwilling) to sowe Corne for their
owne bellies." As such, a new, stricter regime, "an absolute command," was
established, using these rules as a foundation for order.

When Gates left for England on July 20, he
took with him two manuscripts penned by Strachey: a report on the state of the
colony and his account of the Bermuda shipwreck. The Virginia Company, in turn,
addressed Strachey a letter—dated December 14, 1610, and signed by Sir Richard
Martin—requesting his elaboration on life in Virginia, and, in particular, "how
the Barbarians are content with your being there."

Little is known of Strachey's specific activities in the colony from 1610 until
1611, although he clearly had repeated contacts with the Algonquian-speaking Indians of Tsenacomoco, who were engaged
with the English in the First Anglo-Powhatan War (1609–1614). He extensively interviewed two
Indian men, Kemps and Machumps,
both of whom spoke English. And he visited the Quiyoughcohannock and the Kecoughtan Indians. In
September 1611, Strachey returned to England.

By contrast, the Virginia Company declined to publish Strachey's account of the Sea Venture. Although he praised Gates and Somers,
Strachey was forthright about the mutinies in Bermuda and highly critical of the
Jamestown colonists' "Idleness" and their leaders' "misgovernment." Ironically, he
also may have been too effusive in his praise of Bermuda's prospects for
colonization, the English preferring to keep this information close lest it tempt
the Spanish into populating the islands.

Two versions of Strachey's account exist: a rough draft, started in Bermuda and
finished at Jamestown prior to De La Warr's arrival; and a longer, more polished
version begun after Strachey was appointed secretary. Dated July 15, 1610, the
longer version was addressed to an anonymous "Excellent Lady," probably the wife
of a company official. Both drafts likely circulated among Londoners connected to
the Virginia Company, and many scholars believe that Shakespeare used one of them
as a major source for his play The Tempest, thought to have
been written in 1610 and 1611. In 1625, the Reverend Samuel Purchas published Strachey's
longer draft as A true reportory in the fourth volume of
Hakluytus Posthumus; or Purchas His Pilgrimes. He had
obtained the manuscript from Richard Hakluyt (the younger).

In the meantime, Strachey labored on a history
of his time in Virginia as suggested by Sir Richard Martin. He complained that
"many impediments, as yet must detaine such my observations in the shadow of
darknesse," not least of these being disinterest on the part of the Virginia
Company. Put off by Strachey's criticisms, the company could also point to work
published by Captain John Smith
and about to be published by Purchas on the same subjects. Strachey's writing
would be redundant and perhaps even counterproductive. As a result, Strachey
looked elsewhere for support. In 1612 he dedicated his manuscript—The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia; expressing the
cosmographie and commodities of the country, togither with the manners and
customes of the people—to the former colony president George Percy's older
brother, Henry Percy, ninth earl of Northumberland. Northumberland was close to
Sir Walter Raleigh and
Thomas Hariot, both of
whom had been instrumental in the Roanoke voyages. Soon afterward, Strachey dedicated another copy to the
wealthy merchant Sir Allen Apsley, who in 1620 became a charter member of the New
England Company. In 1618, he dedicated a third version to Sir Francis Bacon.
Strachey's connection to all three dedicatees appears to have been minimal.

Finally published by the Hakluyt Society in
1849, Strachey's Historie has since proved to be a rich
source of information about early Virginia Indian society, politics, and religion.
"He was not prepared to be an ethnographer in the modern sense," the
anthropologist Helen C. Rountree has written about Strachey, "but he had a wider
and more detailed curiosity about Indian life than any other writer of his time."
Strachey directly copied some of his material on Virginia Indians from Smith's A Map of Virginia (1612), suggesting that, according to Rountree, "either he is corroborating
Smith's information or he does not know any better than to repeat it."

Later Years

Little is known of Strachey's apparently impoverished final years in London. On
February 8, 1613, a London court ruled against him for an unpaid debt, and a
letter survives in which Strachey, about to meet friends "returned from Virginia,"
begs from an anonymous "Sir" twenty shillings "to pay for my dinner." A poem by
Strachey, "To the Cleane Contrary Wife," was appended to a 1616 edition of A wife, a long poem by Sir Thomas Overbury, who in 1613 had
been poisoned in one of the most sensational crimes of the day. Strachey's wife
Frances Forster Strachey died, probably sometime before 1615, and he married a
woman named Dorothy. Nothing else about her or their marriage is known.

During these years, Strachey kept a commonplace book, filled with various notes,
book lists, and private thoughts, which is now in the possession of the University of Virginia. Three verses on
death also survive, the first beginning: "Harke! Twas the trump of death that
blewe / My hower is come false world adewe / That I to death untymely goe."

Strachey died of unknown causes and was buried on June 21, 1621, in the parish
church of St. Giles in the Camberwell district of the Southwark borough, London.
He left no will, probably because he left no estate to be administered. In 1996,
archaeological excavations at James Fort in Virginia uncovered a brass signet
finger ring used to impress wax seals on documents. It is engraved with an eagle,
the Strachey family symbol dating back to the coat of arms issued to his father in
1587.

Major Works

For the Colony in Virginea Britannia. Lawes Divine, Morall
and Martiall, &c. (1612)

A true reportory of the wracke, and redemption of Sir Thomas
Gates Knight; upon, and from the Ilands of the Bermudas: his comming to
Virginia, and the estate of that Colonie then, and after, under the
government of the Lord La Warre, July 15, 1610. (1625)

The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia; expressing
the cosmographie and commodities of the country, togither with the manners
and customes of the people (unpublished)

Time Line

April 4, 1572
- William Strachey is born in Saffron Walden, Essex, to William Strachey and Mary Cooke.

1587
- Mary Cooke Strachey, mother of William Strachey, dies.

July 4, 1587
- William Strachey is awarded a coat of arms, making him—and by extension his sons, including the future colonist and writer William Strachey—a gentleman.

August 1587
- William Strachey, father of the colonist and writer William Strachey, marries his second wife, Elizabeth Brocket of Hertfordshire. They will have five daughters.

February 14, 1588
- William Strachey enrolls at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge.

June 9, 1595
- William Strachey marries Frances Forster, a distant relative of his mother and the daughter of a wealthy landowner in Surrey.

March 30, 1596
- William Strachey, the son of William Strachey and Frances Forster Strachey, is baptized at Crowhurst, Surrey.

November 1598
- William Strachey, father of the writer and colonist William Strachey, dies. He leaves his estate to his wife Elizabeth Brocket Strachey and then, upon her death, to his son William Strachey.

1602
- Elizabeth Brocket Strachey, second wife of William Strachey, dies, allowing for the transfer of an inheritance to her stepson, William Strachey.

1604
- William Strachey contributes a prefatory sonnet to a publication of Ben Jonson's play Sejanus His Fall.

February 26, 1604
- Edmund Strachey, the son of William Strachey and Frances Forster Strachey, is baptized at Crowhurst, Surrey.

1605
- William Strachey is listed as a member of Gray's Inn, the largest of the Inns of Court in London.

June 23, 1605
- William Strachey mortgages his property in his hometown of Saffron Walden, Essex, to his two brothers-in-law.

August 17, 1606
- William Strachey likely appears before James I at Hampton Court as a member of Sir Thomas Glover's staff. Glover receives his credentials as the king's and the Levant Company's ambassador to Constantinople.

September 1606
- Aboard the Royal Exchange, William Strachey leaves England for Constantinople as secretary to Sir Thomas Glover, the king's and the Levant Company's ambassador to Constantinople.

December 23, 1606
- The Royal Exchange, carrying Sir Thomas Glover and his secretary, William Strachey, arrives in Constantinople. Glover is ambassador to the Grand Signor, representing James I and the Levant Company.

March 17, 1607
- Sir Thomas Glover, English ambassador to Constantinople, fires his secretary, William Strachey, charging him with being loyal to the previous ambassador, Henry Lello.

May 23, 1609
- The Crown approves a second royal charter for the Virginia Company of London. It replaces the royal council with private corporate control, extends the colony's boundaries to the Pacific Ocean, and installs a governor, Sir Thomas West, twelfth baron De La Warr, to run operations in Virginia.

June 2, 1609
- The largest fleet England has ever amassed in the West—nine ships, 600 passengers, and livestock and provisions to last a year—leaves England for Virginia. Led by the flagship Sea Venture, the fleet's mission is to save the failing colony. Sir Thomas Gates heads the expedition.

July 24, 1609
- A hurricane strikes the nine-ship English fleet bound for Virginia on a rescue mission. The flagship Sea Venture is separated from the other vessels and irreparably damaged by the storm.

February 11, 1610
- Captain Christopher Newport and William Strachey serve as witnesses to the christening of John Rolfe's daughter, named Bermuda after the group of islands on which they are stranded. The girl and her mother both die.

March 25, 1610
- Captain Christopher Newport, William Strachey, and James Swift become godfathers to a baby boy called Bermudas after the group of islands on which they are stranded.

May 21, 1610
- Having been stranded in the Bermuda islands for nearly a year, the party of Virginia colonists headed by Sir Thomas Gates arrives at Point Comfort in the Chesapeake Bay.

May 24, 1610
- The party of Virginia colonists headed by Sir Thomas Gates, , now aboard the Patience and Deliverance, arrives at Jamestown. They find only sixty survivors of a winter famine. Gates decides to abandon the colony for Newfoundland.

June 8, 1610
- Sailing up the James River toward the Chesapeake Bay and then Newfoundland, Jamestown colonists encounter a ship bearing the new governor, Thomas West, baron De La Warr, and a year's worth of supplies. The colonists return to Jamestown that evening.

July 15, 1610
- William Strachey completes a revised version of a letter about the Sea Venture shipwreck and the condition of the Virginia colony. Addressed to an anonymous woman, it will be published posthumously by Samuel Purchas as A true reportory of the wracke, and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight (1625).

December 14, 1610
- Sir Richard Martin of the Virginia Company of London addresses a letter to the colony's secretary, William Strachey, requesting his elaboration on life in Virginia and, in particular, "how the Barbarians are content with your being there."

September 1611
- William Strachey leaves Virginia, possibly aboard the Prosperous, and arrives in London either late in October or early in November.

December 13, 1611
- William Strachey's edition of For the Colony in Virginea Britannia. Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall, &c. is entered for publication.

1612
- In London, William Strachey publishes a compilation of all of the laws issued before he left Virginia early in the year. He titles his book For the Colony in Virginea Britannia. Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall, &c.

1612
- After the Virginia Company declines to publish his manuscript, William Strachey dedicates separate copies of The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia to Henry Percy, ninth earl of Northumberland, and Sir Allen Apsley.

February 8, 1613
- A London court rules against William Strachey for an unpaid debt of £30, charging him an additional £5 10s. in court costs.

1615
- Probably sometime before this year, William Strachey's wife Frances Forster Strachey dies, after which Strachey marries a woman named Dorothy.

1616
- William Strachey's poem "To the Cleane Contrary Wife" is appended to an edition of A wife, a long poem by Sir Thomas Overbury, who was poisoned in 1613.

1618
- William Strachey dedicates a third edition of his manuscript The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia to Sir Francis Bacon.

June 21, 1621
- William Strachey's burial is recorded in the parish register of Saint Giles in the Camberwell district of the Southwark borough, London. The cause of his death is unknown.

1849
- The Hakluyt Society publishes William Strachey's The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia.

1996
- William Strachey's signet ring, identifiable by an eagle—the family seal—is discovered by archaeologists working at the site of the first Jamestown settlement.